Dr Paul Allen

Although it is common for my Calvinist, non-charismatic friends to point to church history in support of their cessationist position, it’s really a mistake for them to do so. A big mistake. Church history actually works against them. The first reason is the most obvious. Reformed cessationists, like me, are in the Protestant, rather than Catholic, camp of the church. That means that we believe that, in some very fundamental ways, much of the church lost its way through history, because of which a massive reformation was needed. Many Reformed Christians even argue that Roman Catholics are not Christians at all, meaning that roughly half of all professing Christians today are de facto disqualified. On what basis, then, does a Reformed cessationist appeal to church history, when so much of that history is rejected from the outset? If the argument is that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit which were normative in New Testament times gradually disappeared from church history, what do these ...

It’s not uncommon for me to hear of Christians claiming that God led them to this or that by means of a dream or vision or word from the Lord. When I probe what they mean by that, more often than not it’s just their way of saying they had an idea or imagined a scene. Only occasionally has the person insisted that they literally had a supernatural experience of direct revelation like Paul going to heaven (2 Cor 12) or Peter’s trance (Acts 10).  What deserves acknowledgement that the Spirit prompts us and guides us in our everyday lives. After all, those “who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” (Rom 8:14). Cessationists hold that the revelatory gifts (tongues, prophecies, visions, dreams, etc.) ceased operating when the newborn church matured and the canon was closed (1 Cor 13:2-13). But we can sometimes be annoyingly persnickety about censoring vocabulary that the Bible writers were perfectly comfortable using when referring to the non-revelatory leading of God. Nehe...

Image via Wikipedia Cessationism is not anti-supernatural, nor does it deny the possibility of miracles. When it comes to understanding the cessationist position, the question is  not :  Can God still do miracles in the world today?  Cessationists would be quick to acknowledge that God can act at any time in any way He chooses. Along these lines, John MacArthur explains: Miracles in the Bible [primarily] occurred in three major periods of time.  The time of Moses and Joshua, the time of Elijah and Elisha, and the time of Christ and the apostles.  . . . And it is during those three brief periods of time and those alone that miracles proliferated; that miracles were the norm; that miracles were in abundance.  Now God can interject Himself into the human stream supernaturally anytime He wants.  We’re not limiting Him.   We’re simply saying that He has chosen to limit Himself to a great degree to those three periods of time....